Or had, I guess. Because I’m out of here.
“I don’t need confidence. I’ve got a three-octave range.” I wrinkle my nose. “Not that it matters now.”
Oliver shakes his head, letting out a breath that may or may not be a chuckle.
“What’s so funny?”
He stops just outside the building, his eyes grazing me—the jeans, the floral combat boots, the hand-cut crop top. The immaculately styled eyebrows and cherry-red lip balm and meticulously heated curls. I know I look good, only because I’m in the business of looking good. My rule is to never leave the apartment unless I look and feel like a rock star, because the thing I learned about living in New York before I fully understood what it meant to be a New Yorker is that things are different here than they are everywhere else. There’s this nonstop hopefulness, this weird charge that never leaves the air, like anything can happen. Like your destiny is constantly right around the corner. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to get caught in the same old pair of black leggings and white sneakers everyone else owns when I meet mine.
But Oliver is decidedly not appreciating that sense of destiny when he looks at me, because all I see when his eyes meet mine is a faint smirk.
“Just thinking about the stuff the theater department will finally get done with all the peace and quiet.”
“Ugh,” I say, throwing up my hands. He’s been a lost cause since day one. “See you never, Oliver.”
He seems unconvinced of this but still says, “Fingers crossed.”
I let him have the last word only because I am feeling generous. After all, my future just got set, and his is being stuck here chasing after props backstage and busting the stagehands for smoking pot in the rafters for another year. Meanwhile I’ll be rubbing elbows with future Broadway stars and getting the kind of education I’ll actually use in the real world, full offense to algebra and all the other genres of math.
He disappears into the building, and half a second later, I take off. Sprinting in the late June heat with the cement hot enough to cook an Instagram influencer’s entire brunch plate is admittedly not the brightest move, but I can’t help myself. I’m in the full grip of the Millie Mood now. I scramble up the four blocks to my apartment and take the stairs up to the fifth floor two at a time, pausing only to bang on Teddy’s door across the hall.
“What?”
He goes to a fancy private school, so he’s been out for summer vacation for the last week. Odds are he is on his couch eating his infinitieth bowl of Reese’s Puffs in iced coffee, the kind of lawless behavior only a kid with two extremely busy award-winning brain surgeons for parents can get away with.
“It’s happening!” I call through the crack in the door.
I hear the telltale sounds of Teddy hoisting himself up from his parents’ absurdly large couch. “Which it?”
“It!” I exclaim, turning to my own apartment door. I wedge my boot in the bottom of it and lift the knob up with my palm to get it open without unlocking it, a habit that drives my aunt and dad nuts. But I don’t have time for keys. I leave the door open for Teddy, sweeping through the front hall of the apartment, which my dad has dubbed “The Millie Hall of Fame.” The color of its walls is constantly changing depending on whatever mood my aunt is in, but the rest has stayed the same: wall-to-wall photos of me from infancy to present form, from pudgy baby Millie to hammy toddler Millie to stage-hopping teenage Millie, only briefly interrupted by the 0.2 seconds during puberty when I was shy.
Right now the walls are a charming turquoise, which does nothing to make me want to gag any less. It’s not that I don’t appreciate my dad’s enthusiasm for my antics. It’s just that I am committed to fully reinventing my image every six months, so I have no greater enemy than my past selves, each of them reminding me of the lesser version I was before.
“Dad Dad Dad Dad,” I call.
Any other parent would hear the calamity of me knocking the door open and running through the hall and immediately assume there was a fire, but my dad just glances up from his laptop with his usual mild-mannered smile.
“How was the last day of school?” he asks, adjusting the glasses that seem to be perpetually dipping down the bridge of his nose.
You would think that being the youngest of the dads in my cohort would mean that Cooper Price had one iota of cool, but that, it turns out, is something I must have inherited from my mysterious mom. At thirty-seven years old, my dad is somehow as Dad™ as it gets, complete with a wardrobe of half-zips and khakis, a tech job that he’s described to me and Heather a thousand times without either of us understanding what he actually does, and a book about golf that for some reason lives in our bathroom even though I’ve never once seen him play.
“The last last day of school!” I crow. “Look.”
My dad squints down at the phone I’ve just thrust in his face. “What’s this?” he asks. “Did you get a part in the school show?”
“No, better.” I fully hand the phone to him, hopping on the back of the couch and tapping my foot against it impatiently. “Read it, read it, read it.”
It’s about then that Teddy wanders in, his hair a big floppy mess, his sweatpants far too large for his skinny, overly tall frame. He has to wear a uniform to school, so during the summer he rebels by becoming a full-time Muppet.
“Which it?” he asks again, and it’s clear by the rough edge to his voice that we are probably the first sentient creatures outside of the geocaching app he’s hooked on that he’s spoken to all day.
I grab him by the shoulders, shaking him back into full consciousness. “Madison. Pre. College.”
Teddy’s eyes widen. “Oh,” he says, his breath decidedly smelling of peanut butter, chocolate, and coffee.
A second later, my dad echoes him: “Oh.”
This is marginally better than Oliver’s “Huh,” but still not cutting it.
“So?” I prompt him, releasing Teddy fast enough that despite being a full eight inches taller than I am, he stumbles into the couch.
“Mills…” my dad starts.
The door to my aunt’s room creaks open. Heather’s messy topknot bun emerges first, followed by the rest of her, blinking at the commotion. “What is occurring out here?” she asks, her hands wrapped around a steaming-hot cup of tea despite it being a bajillion degrees outside. To be fair, she works late, so this is basically breakfast time for her.
“I got into Madison,” I squeal.
Her eyebrows fly up into her bangs. “No shit?”
“Not one!”
“You knew about this?” my dad asks, turning to her.
“I didn’t know she applied, I just know what it is,” says Heather, padding over to us in the ratty old Ugg slippers we both have to match. “The school in Los Angeles, right?”
“Yup. All musical theater, all the time. Singing core, acting core, dancing core…”
I begrudgingly put some emphasis on that last one, because despite all my efforts, I don’t fully qualify as a triple threat. I may have pipes that can match pace with Megan Hilty’s and the kind of acting ability to bring strangers to tears, but my feet could definitely use some work.